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Entertainer and Fighter Is Clemens’s Lead Lawyer

Rusty Hardin, the Houston lawyer hired by Roger Clemens to defend him from claims he used performance-enhancing drugs, is a star of the Texas bar, a charmer of juries and journalists and a lawyer whose preparation and aggressive tactics draw in celebrity clients and often send them home with their names cleared.

This week, Hardin has accused the widely respected former Senator George J. Mitchell and his staff of failing to pursue obvious leads in compiling their roughly 400-page report on drug use in baseball and of resorting to McCarthyism in naming players without adequate proof of wrongdoing.

“Very good, well-respected people are sometimes wrong,” Hardin said in reference to Mitchell. “They are wrong not through malice, not through intent, but they are wrong. None of us is beyond making a mistake.”

At the same time, Hardin has vowed to play hardball in attacking Brian McNamee, the personal trainer who told Mitchell investigators that he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone.

McNamee’s credibility had been vouched for by Mitchell and federal law enforcement officials, who said they could charge McNamee with drug dealing and lying to agents if he did not tell the truth. But Hardin argues that the federal authorities and Mitchell investigators did not even interview the police officers who handled a 2001 sexual-assault case in Florida in which McNamee was a suspect. McNamee was not charged in that case, but the officers, who have now been interviewed by Hardin’s own investigators, feel he was not entirely truthful, Hardin contended.

“If we’re trying to decide whether to sponsor this guy as a truth-teller for a report that’s going to stain the names of people if it’s ever made public, shouldn’t we look at whether he’s a truth-teller?” Hardin, who is 66, asked in a telephone interview Thursday. “There’s this automatic assumption to believe what the Mitchell report says,” he added. “The only thing left to me is to try to appeal to the public sense of fairness.”

The charismatic Hardin has emerged as Clemens’s main advocate even as Barry Bonds has just completed hiring a legal dream team in California to defend himself against perjury charges stemming from his grand jury testimony about performance-enhancing drugs.

Clemens, 45, and Bonds, 43, have had parallel Hall of Fame careers, but now they find their legacies — and, in Bonds’s case, even his freedom — in the hands of their lawyers. And in Clemens’s case, it is a lawyer described as “whip smart” by Scott Atlas, 57, a prominent Houston lawyer himself.

“He outworks everybody,” Atlas said of Hardin in a telephone interview Thursday. “And primarily he does his own investigation, pursues every lead, doesn’t take anything for granted. I would say that is what really sets him apart from most lawyers. He will challenge every assumption people have to see what happened, and that’s what’s happening here.”

Photo

Rusty Hardin leaving the federal courthouse in Houston in 2002 when he was representing Arthur Anderson LLP. He lost that case, but gained praise for his work. Credit
Richard Carson/Reuters

Dick DeGuerin, a criminal defense lawyer in Houston who is currently representing a judge accused of sexual harassment by a Hardin client, allowed that Hardin is “a fine trial lawyer.” But DeGuerin said Hardin had misused the news media in the judicial-misconduct case. The judge had to keep silent by terms of the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council, while Hardin helped publicize the woman’s allegations, DeGuerin said. The judge was recently suspended for three months.

Hardin denied any role in publicizing the case. And he said DeGuerin often used the news media for his own purposes. “I hope he made those comments inside a lightning-protected facility,” Hardin said.

Hardin is the middle sibling of three children whose parents were the owners of a small cotton warehousing and trucking company in Monroe, N.C. After law school at Southern Methodist University, Hardin went to work for the Harris County district attorney’s office. He has said that he never lost a case in more than 100 felony jury trials and that he helped send 15 men to death row. He remained a prosecutor for 15 years, then left in 1990 to join a private firm.

“He’s made quite a name for himself — and quite a bit of money,” DeGuerin said.

Hardin’s clients have included many current or former professional athletes. He won jury acquittals for Calvin Murphy (charged with sexual assault of a child), Warren Moon (charged with domestic violence) and Steve Francis (charged with driving while intoxicated). Hardin got the drunk driving charges dismissed against the former Houston Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich, and he won a civil trial for Wade Boggs, who was accused of assaulting a flight attendant on a Yankees charter flight. The jury sided with Boggs in four minutes, according to Hardin’s Web site.

One instance came in his cross-examination of Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy centerfold who married the billionaire J. Howard Marshall II and was in a trial challenging her claim to his money. As she tearfully held a photograph of Marshall to her bosom, Hardin said: “Mrs. Marshall, have you been taking new acting lessons?”

Smith replied with an expletive directed at Hardin.

Representing Arthur Andersen LLP in the 2002 criminal trial of the accounting firm on charges it destroyed Enron documents, Hardin’s staff brought in 21 boxes of files to demonstrate that a witness had actually kept more papers than he destroyed. The prosecutor called it a “stunt” and the judge later said Hardin ran “a circus” and catered to the news media.

Hardin lost that case after a six-week trial. But a 5,000-word profile of him in Texas Monthly in 2002 — entitled “The Trick Is Not to Act Like a Lawyer” — said Hardin was showered with praise even after losing. The jury was at an impasse for more than a week.

In the article, the writer, Pamela Coloff, described Hardin as follows: “He is all things a great defender must be — raconteur, showman, charmer, tactician, egotist — and he has a ferocious charisma that a rival once described as ‘slicker ’n deer guts on a doorknob.’”

Rusty Hardin & Associates, his firm, has seven lawyers who handle only civil cases and Hardin and two others who handle criminal cases as well. It was one of the first law firms in Houston to employ a full-time private investigator, Jim Yarbrough, a retired Houston homicide sergeant. Hardin said another retired officer has joined Yarbrough on the Clemens case.

He likes how well private investigators interview people. And he is planning to do a lot more investigating and a lot more speaking out for Clemens.

“We’re having to try this thing in the court of public opinion, where there are no rules,” Hardin said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Entertainer And Fighter Is Clemens’s Lead Lawyer. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe